He asked him: Are you a Sunni or a Shiite? He replied: I am an atheist. He said: I know. But are you a Sunni atheist or a Shiite atheist?
In the early eighties, I spent more than three months in the British city of Brighton, in a training course most attended by Arabs. Among them is a Kuwaiti. Friendship developed between me and this Kuwaiti. We rent a car to drive around the UK. I didn’t know that he was from a Shiite family except by chance. This happened during a fleeting conversation. The information passed unnoticed. Fifteen years later, and with the development of the clamor of mobilization programs in the Kingdom, I remembered that my Kuwaiti friend was a Shiite and I was a Sunni, and our neighbor on Al-Atayef Street was suspected of Shiites, and I knew that the Iraqi poet Muzaffar Al-Nawab was a Shiite, and whenever I entered a mosque or attended a (blessed) lecture by a (Mubarak) cleric. The Shi’ite is getting clearer in my imagination. I became aware that this man sitting next to me was a Shiite from his name, a Shiite from the looks of his eyes. Shiite by his dialect, Shiite by his clothes. And as the years passed, people’s Shi’ism worsened, so all the senses in my imagination developed to pick up on the Shi’ite, no matter how hidden it was.
There is no doubt that millions of Muslims followed this path, whether they were Sunnis or Shiites.
We did not realize at the time that our Sunni-Shiite identity was inflating and swallowing up our other identities, and in many people the sectarian identity swallowed up his human identity itself. He was ready to die for this identity that destroyed everything inside of him.
My identity as a writer is more important than my identity as a son. I do not follow anyone who is more ignorant than me, whether he is a preacher or a religious sheikh. My identity as my age descended from a history that I did not participate in making. My identity as a writer was made by myself. I went to school and graduated, then entered the university and graduated and made great efforts to learn a foreign language, and read a wide range of books on thought, philosophy and religion. I have traveled to London, Paris, Helsinki and New York. In this wide world, I have friends and loved ones, whom I have never asked regarding their religion, nor have they asked me.
I did not come into this world to be Sunni or Shiite. Before I am a Sunni, a Shiite or even a Muslim, I am a human being. Among the diversity of my personality comes my religion. I do not share with people my religion only, but I share with people my hobbies, tendencies and interests. I encourage Al Hilal or Al Nasr because I love football. I will not hate Talisca or Ighalo because they are not religious. These are my friends who make me happy and make me happy. I will not go with them to church, as this matter does not concern me.
I can be a Muslim without people living around me. I may retire in the Empty Quarter and leave the rest of my life alone with God. God is present among these feuding human beings and is also present in all the retreats I desire. In the Empty Quarter and in the North and South Pole. Whoever told us to join groups in order to be Muslims and to have a sheikh or a mullah at our head, the latest book he read that was published 800 years ago, who teaches us how to enter the bathroom and how to leave it, teaches us how to sleep with our husbands, explains to us our dreams, and decides on whose pulpit whom we dislike and whom Love. God created in us consciences that are the basis of man, so that the right religion comes to complete the nobleness of this conscience, elevate it and purify it, not to reprogram us to enmities and blocs. When I see a person in pain, I immediately help him. I do not ask him regarding his religion or his doctrine. Doctrinal classification is a blatant assault on conscience.
